Daniel Lemire

"By allowing a small group of researchers to be highly productive, by freeing them to explore further with less funding, we could be on the verge of entering into a new era of scientific progress. 

"However, it may not be directly measurable using our conventional tools. It may not appear as more highly cited papers or through large grants. 

"A good illustration is Hugging Face, a site where thousands of engineers from all over the world explore new artificial-intelligence models. This type of work is undeniably scientific research: we have metrics, hypotheses, testing, reproducibility, etc. However, it does not look like ‘academic work’.

"In any case, conventional academics will be increasingly challenged. Ironically, plumbers and electricians won’t be so easily replaced, a fact sometimes attributed to the Moravec paradox. Steven Pinker wrote in 1994 that cooks and gardeners are secured in their jobs for decades to come, unlike stock market analysis and engineers. 

"But I suspect that the principle even extends within the academy: some work, like conducting actual experiments, is harder to automate than producing and running models. The theoretical work is likely more impacted by intelligence artificial than more applied, concrete work."